Professor Jay Sexton, Director of the RAI and author of The Monroe Doctrine, was a guest on the latest Washington Post ‘Presidential Podcast’ to discuss the fifth President of the United States, James Monroe. Hear it here. Considered the last president of the Revolutionary War generation, Monroe assembled a cabinet perhaps unrivalled in American history, with John Q. Adams as Secretary of State and William Wirt as Attorney General. His presidency was, in Sexton’s words, a “transitional moment” in American history at a time of growing sectional identities. Monroe’s deft and “hidden hand” style of leadership would find echoes a century and a half later in the Eisenhower presidency.
A native of Salina, Kansas, Jay Sexton came to Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship in 2000. He has been University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in American History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, since 2004 and became Director of the Rothermere American Institute in 2015. His research focuses on nineteenth century America and its connections with the wider world.
His first book, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 examined the nexus between capital flows and diplomacy in the pivotal period of U.S. national consolidation. The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America emphasized how British power conditioned U.S. diplomacy and expansion.
